Airplane Reading

What to pack for your time in the air

Well, preferably not a novel that begins like this:

I was born to be a wanderer. I was shaped to the earth like a seabird to a wave. Some birds fly until they die. I have made a promise to myself:  My last descent won’t be the tumbling helpless kind but a sharp gannet plunge—a dive with intent, aimed at something deep in the sea.

The narrator in Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle is a pilot who’s apparently considering an intentional plunge into the ocean. I cracked open this book while sitting on the runway last year, waiting for takeoff. Oops.

I am not a good flyer. I never took a physics class that would help me understand how this actually works, and I don’t like the idea of being up there at 30,000 feet with no way out but down. During periods of my life when I’ve flown more often, I get better at it, simply because being anxious about flying is a lot of work. My dread of flying also improved when I learned that calm, meditative music for takeoff was the opposite of what I needed. I prefer a playlist that’s loud and upbeat, in sync with the speed and lift, so I feel more excited than terrified.

In any case, when faced with Maggie Shipstead’s fictional in-flight crisis on page one, I bravely plunged ahead and kept reading, because that was the book I had. It ended up being a good vacation novel—one that held my interest and held up to big chunks of reading time. It just wasn’t such great airplane reading, due to its subject matter.

On Friday, my mom and I flew out of JFK in New York City to Raleigh, North Carolina to visit my uncle—her brother—and my aunt. I’ll spare you the details of our trip, except to say, Google, why would you send us over the George Washington Bridge and through Manhattan to get to Queens when along the way there were several other perfectly good bridges to get us across the Hudson River with far less drama? Maybe you understood something we didn’t. Or maybe I should have vetted you more carefully before we left.

Long story short, with this post in mind, I was going to assess the airport bookstore choices when we arrived at JFK, but summer construction and New York City on a Friday morning being what they are, we only had five minutes to spare before boarding. Then we sat on the tarmac for an hour. (I guess I’m not going to spare you the details.) So, it was a good thing I already had a good book with me.

I started Elizabeth Kolbert’s bestselling The Sixth Extinction, which was great because it kept me from noticing how long we were sitting there. On my last couple of flights, I’ve chosen to pack non-fiction like this, but I find it’s harder to read for hours on end, even if its subject is absorbing. If there’s a lot of information to take in and consider, I’d rather consume smaller morsels. On the other hand, with a good novel, once I get going, I can enjoy a non-stop feast.

I’ll tell you more about The Sixth Extinction on Wednesday, but each chapter offers a lot to consider, so by the time we actually took off, my brain needed a little bit of space to think. I closed the book and watched the scallop of clouds above the edge of the wing for awhile, until the plane banked west and they disappeared. This being a flight from New York to Raleigh, there was only enough time to reach cruising altitude, have a snack, and hand over the trash before we were on our descent.

On a longer trip to San Francisco in December, starting on the plane, I read a good chunk of Indigenous Continent by Pekka Hamalainen. While The Sixth Extinction is natural science (with some personal narrative), Indigenous Continent is straight-up history—specifically, the history of North America told from the perspective of indigenous power. Again, it was an awful lot to absorb—literally “awful” due to so much violence. I read about two-thirds of it on the trip, but I had to take a breather when I got home, and I haven’t yet picked it up again to finish it. I will.

These experiences led me to question what really works for airplane reading, at least for me. I can recall actually buying a book in an airport only once. I was on the way home from Seattle—a long flight—and I had run out of reading material, so I was forced into the terminal bookstore, where I picked up a paperback copy of Nicole Krauss’s novel The History of Love. It turned out to be one of my favorite books. I doubt, however, that I could have picked up a good last-minute read on Friday at JFK. This is all I saw on the rush to the gate. Note that the snack bags have earned as much shelf space as the magazines and books.

Instead of waiting until the airport, I always give the question of what to read on the plane careful consideration as I’m packing my bags. And yet, I don’t seem to have mastered the answer yet.

When I think back on other books, besides The History of Love, that have kept me happiest on a long trip, two others stand out. I once dove so deeply into Elizabeth Gilbert’s The Signature of All Things that I entirely forgot I was on a plane. And I distinctly remember, maybe 30 years ago, reading Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News (another all-time favorite) on a ferry passage to Nova Scotia. For some reason, reading about ferries while on a ferry isn’t as problematic as reading about planes while on a plane. I was completely absorbed.

It seems, based on my recent in-flight experiences with non-fiction, that a novel is what I need for a satisfying airplane read. It’s not easy, though, to find those novels that will monopolize your attention for hours on end. The obvious solution would be to start the novel at home, just to be sure. But there’s something so pleasurable about opening a brand new paperback right after buckling in.

One other option used to be found in the seat back pocket along with the evacuation instructions and an air sick bag. A couple of times when I messed up and brought along a book that just wasn’t good enough, I defaulted to a puzzle in the back of an in-flight magazine. Unfortunately, these publications all seem to have gone extinct. That’s too bad because the quickest flight I ever took, at least in my perception, was a four-hour flight home from Denver. I started a Sudoku puzzle in the back of the magazine high over the Colorado plains.  It was a real brain-twister, and when I looked up, we were approaching New York.

I realize I’m skipping the most obvious entertainment of all, which is to watch a movie or a bunch of TV episodes. But that time in the air is, in a way, a gift—that rare time when there’s nothing to prevent you from reading a book.